On first glance, the Belfast route appears to have been plotted by my brother Paul. For years, whenever friends or friends of friends or members of the Patterson diaspora came to town for the first time, or the first time in a long time, Paul was on hand to give them The Tour: north Belfast, Shankill Road, Springfield Road, the near east ... His only competition was from the black cabs whose drivers doubled as guides, with perhaps a leaning to this side or that depending on where in town they had been hailed.

Now you cannot move in Belfast for tour buses or tour-bus ticket sellers. Many of the buses carry the Titanic livery because, since the turn of the year, you also cannot move for things Titanic. (The Olympic flame, needless to say, takes in Titanic Belfast®. And no, you didn't misread that: they've finally done it, they've trademarked our town.)

This proliferation of tours, and tourists, is not wholly or even mostly a bad thing. (I should perhaps confess at this point that I recently led my own tour around 1830s Belfast – motto: "If it wasn't there then, you're not going there now.") For far too long, the only people who came here – friends of friends and diaspora aside – were journalists and conflict junkies. Now we send our politicians and former combatants to other conflict zones to teach people how to emulate our journey to peace.

It is a journey the Olympic relay is clearly designed to reflect. The route, like my brother Paul's tour, will take in some of Belfast's most notorious "interfaces" when the torch returns here on Wednesday – Duncairn Gardens, for example, and Lanark Way, a favourite escape route in days gone by for loyalist gunmen. In both these areas improvements have begun to be made; barriers have been softened, if not yet removed.

More problematically, the route skirts the site of the former Girdwood army barracks, off the Antrim Road: 11 hectares (27 acres) of inner-city land whose redevelopment has been the subject of protracted horse-trading between the two main parties in our mandatory coalition, Sinn Féin and the DUP.

A fortnight ago, the plans were unveiled at a photocall on the Girdwood site to which, perversely, media access was restricted. The single photograph that was released, though, clearly shows two separate areas of housing: one at the Protestant lower Oldpark end; the other, a quarter of a mile distant, at the Catholic New Lodge. To many here, it looks like an old-style sectarian carve-up – "gerrymandering", we used to call it – only now with two parties colluding.

Actually, to be truly symbolic of Belfast 2012, the Olympic relay ought to have included a three-legged pairing of Sinn Féin and DUP ministers, by turns bickering and whispering in one another's ears. And if by chance the going got too tough, they could always hop on a bus – or give my brother Paul a call.

Glenn Patterson's most recent novel, The Mill For Grinding Old People Young, was the 2012 One City One Book choice for Belfast

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